Happy Jawbone Family Band :: The Silk Pistol
Photo: Harry Gould Harvey IV
Like a jangling juxtaposition between the Manson Family and the cinematic creativity of Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, the Brattleboro, Vermont-based comic collective Happy Jawbone Family Band has been splintering ears and intimately igniting minds since the 2010s with their bubbly brand of esoteric energy and gestures into the galaxy of garage rock. Remember those days before the stronghold of social media, influencer culture, and the corrupted control of Donald J. Trump? When a person, or band, could tour both coasts of the United States, and beyond with their music for next to nothing, and return home with some dignity, and still have enough energy and resources to plan the next run. Happy Jawbone Family Band is radically reminiscent of those sonic salad days, and a great place to start in their dynamic discography is 2012’s “The Silk Pistol”. Like a melodic murderer’s collection of low-fi, lysergical liberations into the human psyche, the band was onto something with their medicinal melodies and low-budget charters into the Great Wide Open. There’s a strong argument that those days were much simpler compared to our current times, and HJFB seemed to have had a wonderful time spreading their spiritual seed across the lyrical lands and melodic mountains before disappearing into the historical hiatus that has taken artists hostage over the last half-century. Led by singer-songwriter and frontman Luke Csehak (The Lentils), the band established its eager existence while Csehak was attending the legendary Naropa University, founded in 1974 by Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa, in Boulder, Colorado. Eventually relocating back to Vermont, the band quickly began writing and recording at spiritual speed to catch up with the visceral vision of their oscillating output.
But something shifted within their singalong structure after the release of 2011’s ”The Return Of Hotel Double Tragedy”, a feverish follow-up to their debut LP on Feeding Tube Records, “Hotel Double Tragedy”. The band released perhaps their most ambitious, yet radically rebellious collection of songs to date, “The Silk Pistol”, and have since become legends in their own right. A mind-altering spell book that unfolds into the universe’s most brilliant, yet violently vegetated environment, where the melodies of a madman reside deep in the greenery of the natural world, the band connects with their creative core like never before, while simultaneously unleashing songs like a soothing solvent sprayed across the economy in an even coating. Released in the summer of 2012, you can hear a happy tear fall to the kitchen floor, splashing against the edge of the stove, as the never-ending wave of nostalgia comes over you like a flush of scientific serotonin, just before the first song kicks off. Throughout the entirety of the album, you can hear the soft sirens of an ice cream truck go by in the vacuum of space, while the reverberation of thrift store instruments dances in and out of creative consciousness across the album’s eleven tracks. Featuring a wide range of rudimentary ramblings and psychedelic poems like“There's Too Much Blood In The Attic Today”, “Deep Dreamer”, “Little Miss Sayonara”, and the album’s epic opener “The Wrong Wings”, the album truly defines not only a specific era, but also a romantic gesture of the times that we should definitely work on getting back to.
